ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the extent to which the landowners and their stewards focused on the profitability of their industrial activities in the accounting data. It probes what they understood as the meaning of 'profit' through the manner in which it was calculated. The level of analysis in the estate cash books indicates that the stewards were interested in tracking and monitoring expenses. Fleischman and Parker identified this as the 'necessary first step' in the development of an effective costing system. Controlling costs through cost analysis did not just apply to commercial activities, but to the household also. Each of the items listed in the Gibside establishment expenditure book for the two-and-a-half years to the 29 June 1725 was categorized with a letter denoting its type. The deficiencies of the earliest examples of double-entry bookkeeping are not surprising from a Marxist perspective, given that the 'calculative mentality' of merchants prior to the late seventeenth century was allegedly still feudal.
